


Housewarming

by ProcrastinatingPalindrome



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Domestic Fluff, Fluff, Light Angst, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-07
Updated: 2017-02-07
Packaged: 2018-09-22 17:15:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,214
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9617417
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ProcrastinatingPalindrome/pseuds/ProcrastinatingPalindrome
Summary: Yuuri realizes that Victor's apartment is lacking something important, and surprises his fiancé with a little redecorating.





	

**Author's Note:**

> My first contributon for Victuuri Week! This is Day 1, and and uses the prompt Surprises. Hope you enjoy!

Victor had never realized how cold and empty his apartment had been until he returned from Hasetsu. The Katsukis’ home had always been full of life, movement and voices. It was warm, alive. It felt like a place where a family was meant to live.

Perhaps the most notable difference was the pictures. They were everywhere: family portraits on the walls, Mari’s old school photos and pictures from Yuuri’s competitions displayed on open surfaces, little snapshots and snippets of their lives in nearly every room. There were albums full to bursting with pictures, which Mrs. Katsuki had so generously shared with him. Victor was delighted to discover that Yuuri had been utterly adorable from the moment he was born on forward.

But much as he enjoyed it, he couldn’t help but feel a pang of jealousy. There were no pictures hanging in his apartment back in St. Petersburg. There had never seemed to be much point. Whose pictures could he hang? His own? He wasn’t nearly that narcissistic. Family wasn’t really an option either. His mother had died when he was too small to remember, and he had cut all ties with his father long ago after years of misery, and never once regretted that decision.

His closest blood relative had been his grandmother. She had been one of the few bright spots on an otherwise dreary and lonely childhood. She was the one who first taught him to skate, before he had even learned how to tie his shoes. Victor had loved her dearly, but she died when he was seventeen and left a terrible aching hole in his heart. He had no pictures of her either. The family photos had been left to someone else in her will, and in his grief after her death he had failed to keep track of where these things ended up.

And so, there were no pictures. He supposed he could have printed off pictures of Makkachin from his phone to decorate, or maybe Chris, perhaps even Yakov, but why bother? His apartment was where he lived, but it had never felt like much of a home. Hanging pictures was what one did in a home, not just the place you slept in and stored your belongings at.

But the apartment had become home now. Yuuri’s toothbrush was next to Victor’s in the bathroom. Yuuri’s coat was hanging by the door. Yuuri’s anti-anxiety medicine was on the kitchen table, and every morning he’d swallow one of the tiny white pills while they had their coffee together.

Victor could never have imagined such happiness a year ago. He had thought he couldn’t possibly be happier, couldn’t possibly love Yuuri more than he already did, but of course, Yuuri was always surprising him.

Victor knew Yuuri was up to something that day when, after several hours of routinely glancing at the clock throughout practice, he turned to Victor and said that he was heading home.

“What for?” Victor said with a frown. It was a rare thing for Yuuri to leave practice early. “Are you not feeling well?”

“Oh no, I’m fine!” Yuuri said hastily, a bit of color rising to his cheeks. “I just…actually, I’ve been putting together a little…well, a surprise for you.”

“A surprise? For me? Really?” Now that he thought of it, Yuuri had been behaving a little strange lately. He had been making lots of phone calls, and stepping outside on the balcony so Victor couldn’t overhear. And there had been packages arriving for Yuuri in the mail, which Yuuri would quickly squirrel away before Victor could get a look. Any attempts at getting more information out of Yuuri had led to deflecting and obvious lies, and Victor eventually let the subject drop and allowed Yuuri to keep his secrets in peace.

“I-it’s nothing big,” Yuuri added sheepishly, scratching at his cheek, “so don’t get too excited. But I need some time to put it together, so keep away from the apartment until I call for you, alright?”

“But what kind of surprise is it?” Victor pressed eagerly, leaning in closer. “Can you give me a hint?”

“It won’t be a surprise if I tell you what it is! And you love surprises. It wouldn’t be any fun if I spoiled it for you, right?”

“I only want a teeny tiny little hint! Is the surprise something edible? Or something one can wear? Or maybe…” Victor leaned closer still, until his lips were nearly brushing Yuuri’s ear, “maybe something too scandalous to mention in polite company?”

The last bit made Yuuri’s face turn a lovely shade of pink. “I told you, you aren’t getting any hints!” he huffed in embarrassment, giving Victor’s forehead a little flick.

“Oh, fine,” Victor sighed dramatically, pulling back before Yuuri could flick him again. “Keep your secrets! Make your fiancé suffer!

Yuuri laughed with a fond shake of his head, still pleasantly flushed. “I think you’ll survive. I’ll see you tonight, okay? And remember, don’t come home until I tell you it’s ready!”

Victor heaved a longing sigh as he watched Yuuri leave the rink. What a long day this would be.

“You don’t mind Yuuri leaving early, Yakov?” he asked his coach. Yakov had been watching Yuuri with a strange expression on his face, but it had vanished the instant Victor spoke. “Usually you’re such a tyrant about anyone skipping out on practice.”

Yakov snorted at him, apparently not appreciative of the ‘tyrant’ bit. “He’s not technically my student. You’re his coach, you’re the one who ought to be keeping track of his training. But for what it’s worth, Katsuki already asked my permission to leave early for the day.”

 “Oh? Did he say anything about what he’s up to?”

“You’ll not get another word out of me, Vitya,” Yakov said sternly. “Now get back to practicing your quad lutz. The last one you did was disgraceful. That year off made you lazy.”

“But do you know what Yuuri-”

“Quadruple lutz, boy. _Now_.”

*************

Yakov’s brutal training helped to make the day pass a bit more quickly, but Victor still couldn’t keep his mind off Yuuri for more than two minutes at a time. It was torture having him away for the day, absolute torture! When his phone finally rang three hours later (‘Yuri on Ice,’ the only proper ringtone for his fiancé,) Victor had flown off the rink and was tugging his skates off almost before Yakov had a chance to yell at him.

Hailing a taxi would take too long at rush hour, and the apartment was only four blocks away, and so Victor ran back home as quickly as he could. He was a bit winded by the time he got there (perhaps Yakov was right about him being a bit out of shape) but Yuuri was waiting outside for him with an adorable smile. It was worth the wait just to come home to that smile.

“Now, it’s completely fine if you don’t like what I’ve done here,” Yuuri said as they rode the elevator up to their apartment, “or if you want to change something about it, or put things back how they were.”

“So you’ve been…redecorating?” Victor asked with a tilt of his head. “Repainting the walls, maybe? Or did you get some new furniture?”

“Come on, you waited all day!” Yuuri laughed. “You can be patient for just a few more minutes, can’t you?”

Yuuri insisted that Victor close his eyes before entering the apartment, and lead him blindly in by the hand while Victor was nearly bouncing with anticipation.

On Yuuri’s command, he opened his eyes. His breath caught, his heart skipping a beat.

The apartment was full of pictures.  Nearly every free space was now decorated with a plain wooden frame, each sporting a different picture. They were on the bookshelf, the coffee table, the kitchen counter…

“I went a little overboard,” Yuuri admitted with a sheepish laugh. “We don’t have to keep all of these, I just wanted to have a good collection to start off. And the picture frames, I bought them in bulk at a discount store since I needed so many, we can definitely trade them out for something nicer later.”

Victor barely heard him. His eyes were glued to the photos. There was a family portrait of the Katsukis, and next to it a group shot of Victor with his rinkmates in St. Petersburg, posing and pulling faces at the camera. Then there was a young Yuuri cuddling with Vicchan (so tiny! Yuuri had braces!), and another of Makkachin when he was a puppy, laying on his back with his paws in the air.

“How long have you been working on this?” Victor said, once his breath had returned enough to form words.

“I actually started a couple weeks after I moved in. And I got a lot of help from my mom, and our friends…Yakov actually helped me quite a bit too, once I told him about the project. You didn’t have a single picture of anyone in your apartment. Not friends, or family…it seemed sort of lonely. I thought this might make the place feel more like a…I don’t know, a _home_.”

A home. A _home_. A home for the both of them, a home they could share, a warm home for a family. Suddenly there was an enormous lump in Victor’s throat.

“So?” Yuuri continued, just a hint of nerves in his voice. “What do you think? Do you like it?”

Victor could only manage a nod and a wobbly smile before turning back to the pictures, blinking back the stinging in his eyes. There was a picture of Yuuri giving Phichit a piggyback ride, both laughing and, judging by the flush on their faces, probably a little drunk.

And then there was one of Victor and Chris at Disneyland Paris with their arms around each other’s shoulders, wearing Mickey Mouse ears and making duck faces. God, how long ago had that been? Victor still had long hair back then, and Chris hadn’t reached his full height yet.

Next to that was…oh god, it was his absolute favorite of Yuuri’s baby pictures, the one of eighteen-month-old Yuuri wearing an utterly precious hooded dog onesie with floppy ears. The first time Victor saw that picture he nearly died on the spot, keeled right over at the Katsuki family’s kotatsu, slain by the sheer cuteness of his fiancé’s baby pictures.

“That was one of the first ones Mom sent me, when I told her what I was up to. She said you loved it when she was showing you the photo albums, and that you’d probably be happy to have a copy of your own.”

“Your mother knows me so well,” Victor said with a little laugh, his heart full to bursting. “This is wonderful, darling. I love it, absolutely love it.”

 “Hold on, there’s a couple left you haven’t seen yet," Yuuri interrupted, just as Victor had turned to him for a kiss. Victor was nearly disappointed, until he followed Yuuri over to  corner of the living room where a few more pictures were displayed in a cluster.

These were pictures of the two of them. The selfie they took last summer when they went to the beach on their day off from training. A picture someone had snapped of the two of them enjoying katsudon together. And...oh, that one was from the Cup of China, right after their first kiss, while they were still laying on the ice together, gazing into each other's eyes without a single care for the media buzzing excitedly around them at such a dramatic gesture. The next was taken after their pair skate, the two of them still in costume and flushed with joy, Yuuri reaching up to touch Victor's cheek as if he was the most precious thing in the world.

There was one more left, but this one was different. It was an older picture, a bit faded with age. Victor’s breath caught in his throat as he realized what he was looking at. The last picture showed an older woman skating at an outdoor rink and holding the hand of a small boy with a round face and blue eyes. The child couldn’t have been more than four, and was staring down at his skates with a look of utmost concentration. The woman was smiling down at him, warm and fond, her mouth the shape of a heart.

“Where did-” Victor had to stop and swallow hard before he could continue. “Where did you find this picture?”

“Yakov helped with this one. He said you didn’t have any pictures of your family, so he did some digging, looked up some distant relatives of yours to see if anyone had anything. This was the best one that turned up. That _is_  you, isn’t it?”

“Yes, that’s me," Victor whispered, blinking hard. "And my…my grandmother.”

 "Hey," Yuuri murmured gently, snaking an arm around Victor's back and pulling him in close. “Are those happy tears?”

“Of course, darling," Victor sniffed quietly, making no attempt to dry his wet cheeks as he twisted around in Yuuri's embrace and leaned in for a kiss. "The happiest.”

Victor was home.


End file.
